Over the past couple of weeks, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle surrounding HTC and its shut down of HTCRUU.com. The general consensus across the Android community has been quite understanding in some respects – after all, HTC has every right to protect its intellectual property. The problem was, however, that in the original takedown request, it also demanded that all hosted RUUs and Sense-based ROMs be indefinitely removed, as well.

Late last week, news broke that HTC was forcing the owner of HTCRUU.com to not only give up the domain, but remove all hosted RUU files and custom ROMs based on Sense. This was, of course, because he was in violation of HTC's intellectual property rights, as the site's name had "HTC" in the title, was adorned with official HTC logos, and contained official HTC software. Needless to say, the developer community was a little up in arms over the removal of the files – especially because HTC specifically requested that the Sense-based ROMs be taken down.

Update: This whole situation ended up being resolved just a couple of weeks after this story was published, with HTC backing off on its assertion that the stock and custom HTC ROMs couldn't be distributed. It did request that the HTCRUU.com domain be handed over, but the ROMs that were hosted there previously will now be available at ruu.androidfiles.org. It's good to hear HTC isn't cracking down on the custom software community, though whether this resolution came about because of a legitimate misunderstanding, or simply as PR damage control, isn't clear.